”Divine Fruitfulness”

March 7, 2010

Communion Sunday

The Rev. Annemarie S. Kidder

Luke 13:1-9 

In the movie Grand Canyon, a man takes a detour from a traffic jam.  The detour leads him through dark and sinister streets, populated by those with a taste for expensive sneakers and guns.  Then the nightmare begins:  his luxury car stalls and he makes a frantic phone call for a tow truck.  Shortly thereafter, his car is surrounded by five armed thugs who threaten to do him considerable harm.  Just in time, the tow truck arrives and its driver begins to hook up the disabled car.  The thugs protest:  he is interfering with their catch.  So the driver takes them aside for a lesson:  “Man,” he says to them, “the world ain’t supposed to work like this.  Maybe you don’t know that, but this ain’t the way it’s supposed to be.  I’m supposed to be able to do my job without asking you if I can.  And that dude [over there] is supposed to be able to wait with his car without you ripping him off.  Everything’s supposed to be different than what it is here.” 

The world ain’t supposed to be like this.  I’m supposed to be able to do my job; you, along with the church officers, are supposed to be able to do yours.  At the seminary in Detroit, where I teach, we have a security code for the building and a guard is on duty outside in the parking lot while classes are in session.  In the past, parked cars have been broken into.  And there were muggings, even murders, in the neighborhood.  While students and faculty are hard at work inside the classroom, someone on the outside interferes.  While they do what they are supposed to do, someone causes them harm.  In Detroit, you don’t have to go very far to end up in a deserted and ominous-looking neighborhood.  Between ram-shackle houses and littered side alleys, you see people loitering in corners or sitting hunched over on front steps.  This isn’t the way it’s supposed to be.  And you can’t help asking:  What went wrong? 

Where did crime come from?  Where does violence and aggression have their start?  Sociologists tell of the connection between poverty and crime.  Root out poverty and you will be eventually rooting out crime, they say.  There is a connection between aggression and lack of education.  Provide better and more affordable education, and you are staving off violence in its roots.  Psychologists say that anger and aggression are the result of low self-esteem.  Get to the root of low self-esteem by offering a job to do and positive affirmation and you will be creating an environment conducive to peace.  We have heard it countless times.  And in our own small ways we try doing our share in being teachers and peacemakers by helping someone move from aggression to collaboration, from destructive behavior to a shared concern for the common good. 

The Bible has a different take on why things aren’t the way they are supposed to be.  It’s summed up in the little three-letter word “sin.”  At the root of evil, at the bottom of aggression lies human sin.   Even natural disasters, such as droughts, famine, and the extinction of species, have their cause, to some degree, in human behavior spun out of control.  Sin is no respecter of persons.  And it doesn’t stop at the front doors of Christians either.  How often have we seen contentious and destructive behavior in a brother or sister in Christ?  Yet, we did not call it out and held back in naming it for what it is.   

From the biblical perspective, the reason things aren’t the way they are supposed to be is the unfettered reign of sin.  Yet, the Bible promises us the joy of the Lord because Christ has won for us victory over sin.  So if joy has gone out of our life, something has come in between.  Something is clogging up our pipeline to inner peace.  In all these years of ministry I have often wondered why churches seem to pay so little attention to what should be their main business:  the early detection of sin and an ambulance rush to administer first aid.  The church used to be called a hospital for sinners, where the foremost goal was to examine the symptoms and then to prescribe a cure.  Instead, we act as if we have to be polished clean first before joining.  Disruptive and disempowering behavior is portrayed as normal, and the trouble maker often gets a badge of praise. 

In recent years, denominations have witnessed the decline of church membership and they have developed tools to help churches identify their spiritual health, which is to say to measure the toxin of sin present.  An unhealthy church, one denominational tool says, is marked by such characteristics as negativity among members, lack of vision, unofficial means of communication—another word for gossip and rumor mills, lack of transparency, and power handed over to unofficial authority figures who are given all the say.  A healthy church, by contrast, has a high level of optimism among members, a vision for its future, official means of communication, a high level of transparency, and power and authority exercised by those who have been put in charge.  It is not hard to guess which church will exude a sense of joy and peace and be drawing members. 

In the parable of the fig tree, Jesus offers us a litmus test not only for the church’s health but also for that of our soul.  Are you producing kingdom fruits? He is asking.  Is the fertilizer of worship and prayer and Bible study producing attractive and juicy figs?  As individuals and as a church, we have one purpose alone:  to be trees bearing fruit that draw others to the way it’s supposed to be.  Our lives are meant to be lamp posts and street signs that draw people to God’s kingdom.  Our talents are the skills to bring it about.  Our words and deeds make real and concrete his love.